Author: eigenKOR2018a-admin

A lot of brands are already making their mark on the digital landscape using video ads with Facebook, are you? In this article, we are going to tell you all you need to know to get started with your First Facebook Video Ad.

Digital Marketing is something that’s constantly evolving; it’s changing every moment and has a diverse set of aspects. Trends here change everyday and while we have GIF’s one day, the next day it’s all about “Touch and Hold” posts or “Touch to See” posts. If you don’t keep evolving the type of content you send out, it’s tough to get your audience to follow you; however, there’s one type of ads which have stood the test of time, Video Ads. It’s been found that video ads achieve 135% higher organic reach as compared to static posts. Facebook, a highly utilized avenue for social media marketing, itself claims that, worldwide, people spend around 100 million hours everyday watching Facebook Video Ads and in this time, there are a total of 8 Billion Video Views.

More and more brands are constantly engaging their agencies to build video ads in order to build customer outreach, achieve higher conversion, etc. Regardless of whether you are a startup trying to better explain your product/service to your target audience base or a large consumer brand trying to create awareness for your latest product, videos can help. In the modern entrepreneurial world, startup explainer videos are a must for both explaining your startup idea to consumers and to investors; meanwhile, most FMCG’s consider that video ads are a must whenever a new product hits the market.

In a study with marketers using Video Ads, 97% said that videos helped them better explain a product or service to the target market. In the same study, it was also found that 81% marketers linked video ads to a direct increment of sales. In a second study, it was found that video-based e-mail marketing has boosted e-mail click-through rates by a whooping 200-300%! So now that you know how important video ads are, let’s get started with everything that you need to know to get started with your first video ads:

(1) Creating a Buyer Persona

The first thing that you need to do whenever you are creating a video ad is to understand who the ad will be delivered to, in other words, you need to create a buyer persona. A buyer persona is essentially a broad description of your target audience base.

There is, however, a key difference. While in a target audience base, we specify an audience based on demographics such as age groups, gender, work titles, etc. A buyer persona is much more specific, for example, in case of a pizzeria close to a college, a buyer persona may be an 18-year-old male college student who likes cheese, goes to classes five days a week and is looking for a great place for meals between classes. Most businesses have multiple sets of buyer personas.

A sample buyer persona profile of Hubspot

(2) Creating the Content for your Advertisement:

Once you are done with building the perfect buyer persona for your business, you need to get started with the content of your video. Ideally, you would want the content in your video to resonate with your target audience base and have values that would appeal to them. There are a few ways to do that:

• Relate to your target audience base:

This is one of the reasons why creating a buyer persona is so important when trying to build a quality ad. If you are trying to build an unbeatable ad, you need to raise some kind of emotions within your target audience’s mind. Going back to the pizzeria example, if you realize as the business owner that a large portion of your target audience is made up of people who like a lot of cheese, you can just make a video which clearly shows how much cheese goes on to make your pizzas.

• Be Specific:
You don’t want your ad to confuse your target audience, so be very specific regarding the message that you want to send out to. Going back to the pizzeria example, if you are trying to promote the usage of cheese, show how much cheese goes into making a pizza, don’t show that you have quality chefs or you have a clean kitchen.

• Try to solve specific problems that your target audience suffers from:
Does your product or service solve a problem in the local area or does it make the lives of people easier? If it does then you should focus your video on that. For example, if our theoretical pizzeria also has a 24/7 delivery service to student dorm rooms that no other eatery in the area offer, you might think of promoting that in a video ad as well.

(3) Tailor Your Content:

People’s attention spans are getting shorter and shorter every day, the more digital device and media people engage themselves into, the lesser it gets. In fact, our attention span is now shorter than that of a goldfish’s. Savvy video marketers know this fact and that’s why they are now tailoring content in order to make videos shorter. In fact, 56% of all videos published last year for marketing purposes were shorter than 2 minutes in length. Thereby, it’s a good idea to not include content such as interviews or anything else that requires a lot of time in your video. Remember that when it comes to video ads, the shorter it is, the better.

(4) Find a good agency
Find a good agency and set up a meeting. Now this here is a must, most entrepreneurs figure that they can do video marketing by themselves and end up spending a ton of money for something that doesn’t get even the least bit of traction. Making a quality video involves a lot of aspects such as lighting, sound control, cinematography, color toning, mastering, editing, etc. and it usually takes a team of people to do it. If you decide that you will go for video ads to market your business, you need to follow the above steps and then find a good agency that has a decent video ads portfolio to execute your ideas to perfection.

With so many options just clicks away, shoppers nowadays have no time to waste on poor performing websites. Poor website performance and user experience can be caused due to a few issues, but the most important one out of those is page load time. If you are in any business where your website is a source of revenue, you need to know and act on page loading time right now because if you don’t, you will be losing out on a lot of revenue that your competitors will be gaining!

What is Page Load Time?

Well, according to Google, Page loading time is the average time (in seconds) it takes a certain page to go from initiation (Clicking on the link or pressing enter after typing the URL) to completion and display of the page to the visitor. Putting it simply, it is the amount of time a certain page takes to show up on your computer screen after you have tried to access it. Page speed can also be called to be “Time to first byte” which is the length of time your browser takes to receive the first byte of information from the web server.

How Does Longer Page Loading Time Take Away your Sales?
A recent survey by Microsoft Corporations has shown that our social media and smartphone based life has brought our attention span down to 8 seconds! Which means that human beings nowadays, spend 8 seconds on a topic on an average before moving on to another. With those kinds of numbers in mind, do you really think that people will be waiting for minutes for your site to load? Of course not, in fact, according to surveys done by Akamai and Gomez.com, it has been found that most people expect pages to load within 2 seconds, maximum. 79% of the consumers participating in the same survey stated that they will not return to a site if they experienced poor website performance the first time around. A staggering 52 percent has also stated that quick page load time and website performance is a significant factor when it comes to being loyal to the website.

A long page loading time has also been found to be associated with reducing mobile consumer experience significantly. E-commerce site pages which have not been bootstrapped properly tend to have lower mobile page load time and may stand to lose out on a lot of revenue. A one second delay in page loading time for an e-commerce website that earns $50,000 a day may cause the business to lose out on approximately a million dollars annually.

How to measure Page Loading time
A lot of entrepreneurs have a tough time when it comes to measuring their website speed. No, you don’t have to keep a stopwatch at your hand when you are measuring page load time, nowadays, there are a plenty of websites online which can help you measure the page loading times of your website. A few examples include KeyCDN Speed Test, Google Page Speed insights, Pingdom and UpTrends.

Websites such as KeyCDN can give you a detailed overview such as this on the loading times of your website’s pages.

Effects of low Page Speed:
Low Page speed can have a myriad of effects on your website, not only on your sales but on other aspects as well, here are a few aspects which may be adversely affected by slow page loading speeds:

• Low SEO score:

Most people dislike low website speed, so when a page takes a long time to load, it’s usually associated with high bounce rates as well. One of the prime factors that effect Google’s SEO score is the experience that a site provides to its visitors, and naturally, high bounce rates are associated with websites that are not able to provide a good experience to its visitors. Thereby, lower page speeds are often associated with lower SEO scores.

• Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty:

A lower website speed has also been found to adversely affect customer satisfaction levels as one research has found that a one second delay in website speed has caused customer satisfaction to go down by 16%. With the bearing down of customer satisfaction, so does customer loyalty. This is immense for any e-commerce business nowadays as ensuring customer loyalty & satisfaction is often hailed as the best way for customer retention. 52% online shoppers have stated the importance of a quick loading site when it comes to retaining customer loyalty.

This infographic sheds light on how much page speed can affect your online business.

• Conversion:

Any e-commerce businessmen will understand the significance of conversion; you can have the best marketing strategies in place to bring hoards of people into your site, but if your website performance is poor, you can be sure that most of those visitors won’t actually place an order in your site and follow through with it.

Conversion is often called “User Optimization” and there is an important reason for that, if a site is good for the users, provides the users with great experiences, then there will be higher conversions. If it’s not optimized for its users, then it will not be getting many conversions, it’s as simple as that!

• Search Engine Indexation:
Did you know that lower page speed can cause Google to not index your site properly? Yes, that’s absolutely right, folks! A lower page speed causes search engine crawlers to be able to index fewer number of pages using their allocated crawling budget and schedule, so for example, if a search engine crawler is only able to index 50% of your pages within its allocated schedule due to low site speed, the other 50% of your pages will not be indexed and thereby, you will lose valuable search traffic.

Regardless of where you are in the United States right now, if you are an entrepreneur, you must have heard of digital marketing by now. Back in 2006, it was hailed to be the next big thing in the realm of Marketing; however, now, it’s more or less a necessity for B2C* and even for some B2B* businesses to survive. In fact, a lot of brands nowadays allocate a higher share of their marketing budget towards digital marketing as compared to traditional marketing strategies- the good old expensive big banners, billboards, posters, flyers and television ads!

As of 2016, it is estimated that there are a staggering 290 million internet users in the United States, that’s nearly 90% of the whole population. So it’s a safe bet to say that every 9 out of your 10 customers are going online for different purposes. PwC estimated in a 2016 survey that 54 percent of all customers go online to buy products on a weekly basis. So even if you have a poster in the busiest street in the city or a shop in a commercial hotspot, you are still not going to reach nearly as much people as you could have done with an ad online, for a fraction of the cost!

The graph demonstrates the variation of the number of internet users in the US over the years. Source: Statista.com

The sheer number of consumers with an online footprint is the reason why most brands are pursuing digital marketing nowadays. So, let’s take a look at what all the fuss is about, let’s find out what digital marketing actually is.

What is Digital Marketing

Well, essentially digital marketing is an umbrella term which unifies all sorts of online marketing strategies such as Social Media Marketing, Pay per Click Marketing, Search Engine Optimization (Although it can be considered as an entirely different field), Search Engine Marketing, Content Marketing, etc. Digital marketing is used by both B2B (Primarily for lead generation) and B2C brands (Primarily for customer acquisition and customer retention). Digital marketing is one of the most prominent forms of marketing at the moment. As of 2017, the market value for digital marketing stands at $37.48 billion which is expected to surpass $75 billion by 2022.

Digital marketing is a constantly growing field and it increases with the increase of digital media devices and forms. Back in the early 2000s, when it was still a growing field, only the leading brands invested in digital marketing, but nowadays even the local mom and pop store has a digital marketing budget.

Why Should You Opt for Digital Marketing over Traditional Marketing

This is one of the most common questions that entrepreneurs ask while deciding to pursue online marketing and well, there are plenty of reasons for this:

• High Reach:
The 21st century US internet penetration has been so deep and diverse that there are internet users in almost all the demographics. Consequentially, businesses in almost all sectors will be able to find a high online user presence within their demographics.

• Staggeringly High Returns on Very Low Investments:
Another reason 21st century entrepreneurs opt for digital marketing is that of the high amount of people it can reach with very low investment. There are certain forms of digital marketing which practically cost nothing and offer very high returns. Most B2C businesses run customer acquisition and customer retention campaigns simultaneously via digital marketing because it costs so low and yields so high.

• Audience Targeting Features:

You can put up a billboard on a busy street and pay millions over years, but can you control who sees the billboard? Do you have any control over who views the newspaper ads that you just published? No. That’s where digital marketing comes in, with many forms of online marketing, you can control who sees your ad and who doesn’t and you can do that over plenty of demographics: age, gender, interests, preferences, language, etc.

• It’s much more Interactive:
This is another great bit about online marketing, your audience can interact with your ads, they can even place orders for products or request for services instantly if they see your ads. B2B businesses often employ online marketing strategies for lead generation because it works like a charm since they can not only reach out to their target audience base, but their target audience base can use their ads to reach them with a few clicks.

Traditional marketing forms are linear- meaning that it’s a one directional form of communication but with digital marketing, its two directional, consumers can communicate with you via your ads. This can help in both customer acquisition and customer retention.

• Market Analytics:
No traditional marketing reports are concrete; traditional marketing often acts upon prediction. For example: The foot traffic at Wall Street is mostly businessmen, but traditional marketing firms can’t say for certain, the percentage of businessmen who uses Wall Street, the ratio of male to female businessmen, etc. That’s where the digital parameter thrives, everything’s about data in the digital scene, so you will have all kinds of market analytics to base your advertisements on.

Print Media is Dead Side: So, you want facts, right? Newspaper advertising is expected to witness its biggest decline to date — it’s forecasted that the revenues will go from $18.8 billion to $14.9 billion between 2017 and 2020.

Print Media is Alive Side: Even then, 56% of all people deem print media as the most reliable form of marketing than digital marketing, thus giving local businesses increased exposure.

Print Media is Dead Side: Not quite true. According to my statistics, mobile marketing is the reigning king of digital marketing with Google playing a huge role. The search engine drives 96% of traffic, thus giving local businesses a better chance of receiving exposure.

Print Media is Dead Side: That is why we have mobile apps! More and more local businesses are developing mobile apps because 89% people prefer to use an app. Either businesses get an app or advertise through existing social media apps like Facebook.

Print Media is Alive Side: But….

STOP!

Let me speak…. Print media will not die and digital marketing will not take over print media. The statistics both of you are shying away from is…

Just because Democrats and Republicans can’t work together, doesn’t mean print media and digital marketing can’t work together as well. Local businesses need to use both in tandem to fuel their advertising and marketing efforts, attract customers, and increase revenue.

Not convinced yet… here are more facts at your disposal:

According to the research conducted by Pennsylvania News Media Association, people under 45 refer to online advertising while people over 55 refer to print advertising. If local businesses want to target both markets, they should advertise in both mediums.

According to the 2015 yearly report by CMI, print advertising ranked the second most used form of advertising with 57% of businesses using it.

We are all familiar with the popular social media websites and applications that are easily accessible over the internet such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. But what exactly is social media? It is a series of applications designed to enhance the sharing of content in real time.

By this definition, you can see that even though you might be on Facebook or Twitter, you are not engaging in social media. Approximately 50% of all users do not create or share content but instead only scroll down the feeds as a way to update themselves with world news and events.

Social media has revolutionized the way products and services are being marketed today. The ability to share content with the masses over the internet is changing the way we live our lives and run our businesses. However, the key to the success of social media marketing is the same as regular marketing. You need to have a strategy in place to attract the highest number of views.

It is all about your outreach, views, and subscribers. It has entirely become a numbers game. Statistics have also become easier to record, and hence your social media strategy can be tweaked accordingly. Having a business website is just not enough to reach your target customer base, but you also need to have a strong and active social media presence.

Why no one is seeing your social media posts

Five years ago it was much easier to get ‘likes’ on your Facebook page and engage directly with the subscribers. However, websites have been continuously improved to filter search results as the number of users has grown. Websites such as Facebook use algorithms to show people what it thinks they might be interested in. So even though you might be selling premium products or posting good quality content, the algorithm determines how many people will actually get to see your content based on a number of metrics like location, sex, preferences, relationship status, etc.

Engagement with the content is determined organically. If more people comment and discuss your posts, it will spread to other users much faster and increase participation. The algorithm determines the importance of any given content based the number of people engaged, and distributes it on accordingly.

What can you do to increase viewer engagement on your social media posts?

Having a large social media following in today’s world means having more power – power to influence trends, change perspectives and share ideas. Teen celebrities make it to Hollywood by becoming famous first on Instagram or YouTube.

A large following might also determine the success and failure of your business venture, its identity and brand image. In order to achieve this, you need to be highly active on social media.

Be active on all platforms

Facebook is the most widely used social media website in the world with approximately 1.55 billion active monthly users. If you do not have an active Facebook page for your business, you might as well not exist for many customers. Facebook has also increased the outreach for home based and small businesses who do not want to have a website domain

Twitter boasts a respectful 255 million active monthly users. Twitter is mostly used for news and information rather than images and video content. It is the perfect online marketing tool for businesses that want to reach out to people and market their products.

Instagram is a visual platform designed for customers to post, share, comment, and engage through digital media. People share their stories with friends, families, and strangers all around the world. Instagram is the best social media platform to showcase new places, skills, photography, and content.

LinkedIn is regarded as the professional social networking site with more than 467 million users. It focuses on individual profiles and job opportunities rather than content. LinkedIn is a great way to connect with new potential clients and network with people around the world.

Increasing content outreach

Your strategy is only as effective as the number of people you are able to reach and the return you get from any investment you make. It’s imperative that you reach the right type of people too. Here are some ways to increase your outreach.

Paid advertisements – these can be targeted towards your specific customer segment. This is quite inexpensive and the fastest way to reach more people. Do you see those sponsored ads on your Facebook feed? That is what this is. There is no extensive process either. You do not have to be a technical genius to sponsor your ads. Just a credit card and a few clicks and you are all set to conduct expansion.

Relevant content – people are interested in food, mobile phones, technology, fitness, celebrities and cars today, more than anything else. If your content is not relevant to the interest of the people you are less likely to get any attention. Also, you need to differentiate your service from other bloggers of the same idea. It is highly competitive because anyone with a computer and an internet connection can potentially become a blogger.

Start at home – the common saying is “charity begins at home.” Although this is not the same as charity, home is the best place you will get support. Personally engaging with your family members and friends will encourage them to support your ideas and content in the digital world as well. Cyberspace can be cruel to most, and you will need all the help that you can get.

Always stay active – there is no faster way to lose your following than becoming inactive. Even if it is for a day or two, people tend to lose interest and move on to other interests, often your competitor. As much as originality, branding and style matter, ‘consistency’ is key. You must have seen people upload apologies on their social media handles if they disappear for a while. This is because they do not want to lose any of their fans.

Enhance participation – contest and giveaways are a trending form of attracting more attention. It might seem desperate to some but it works. Getting sponsorships with famous entities such as Amazon, Apple, Samsung and other tech giants has been reported to bump up revenues substantially

Email has become a form of day-to-day communication nowadays. Daily, more than 269 billion emails are sent and received through various electronic devices such as computers, tablets, and smartphones over the internet. That is an average of 35 emails per person on Earth.

The use of email started in the 1960’s although it has changed a lot since then. In the beginning, some systems required the sender and the receiver to be online at the time of chatting or sending and receiving emails. Today email servers operate on an independent basis. They accept, store and display the information when the receiver comes online.

Email as a marketing tool

Email is also widely used as a medium and tool for marketing. Huge numbers of emails are sent out to the targeted segment for any product or service that businesses want to promote. Most of these emails end up in spam folders and get deleted or are never opened. These emails are meant to spread awareness, and each receiver is potentially a customer or a client for the business. Marketing emails might contain ads, digital posters or invitations to events.

Market segmentation

The emails intended to promote businesses are not sent out at random. Websites and emails are constantly tracked for user’s interests and search patterns. Complicated and advanced algorithms are used to track the user’s online activity. This information on customers is bought and sold by large corporations and media agencies that are looking to expand their business operations. More than 40% of emails are tracked worldwide.

What really works in 2017

Most emails are ignored and never opened. Most people have become smarter against scammers, and are more tech savvy when it comes to using the internet. Most people do not want to waste hours replying to unnecessary emails that lead nowhere. People often have multiple email addresses for friends, work associates and family correspondence. Trends show that email marketing works best when the following features are incorporated:

Interactive emails – people are more engaged if the email is interactive or has some kind of video content. Other options can include add to cart functionality, images, discount coupons and show passes. Interactive emails have a higher click rate and better response overall.

Personalized emails – data is being collected on all users. This data is used to make future sales predictions and estimate production costs. Also, emails and ads are directed to specific users that might be interested in certain ads. There are softwares that use smart integration to personalize emails as they are sent to each potential client to make them relevant and get a better response. This is a game changer in email marketing.

Automated emails – these are reminder emails to get the customer to use the app or services of the website again. These can be sent out on a daily basis or on a need-to basis. This makes the experience more engaging, and brings more subscribers to the business.

What does the future hold for email marketing?

The general view of researchers and analysts is that email marketing is here to stay. However, it will evolve with the passage of time. People will innovate and come up with new ideas and ad campaigns to attract more buyers. Lifestyle trends all across the world are now changing and so will email marketing to adapt to these changes.

Ecommerce businesses – Alibaba and Amazon are the two giant world ecommerce business platforms that most people are familiar with. These businesses are on the rise and expanding rapidly. People use the app on their smartphones to place orders and receive the item at their doorstep. This reduces the need to chat with a live person. So you can expect to have more chatbots behind email generation in the future. Even smaller ecommerce businesses have started using chatbots to save costs on customer support representatives and speed up the whole supply chain process. Chatbots can send out confirmation emails, newsletters, job applications, scheduling details and abandoned cart emails.

Shorter emails – people generally do not have the time to read long articles and go through detailed emails. According to research in 2016, the preferred length of an email was less than 125 characters. Anything longer than that means losing the clients interest and hence losing a potential customer. People want it precise and specific to them or they just don’t care.

Context identification – if you use the word “attached” in an email and do not add an attachment, it automatically prompts you to confirm that you want to send the email without an attachment. This is also the case with scheduling appointments and making plans with friends. Google and Facebook both actively update their services to identify the context of the conversation. This makes it easier and more convenient for the users.

Creating a personal connection – previously automated emails could easily be identified as sent by a robot. Now emails have a more conversational style. This means they are not as formal and customers are able to better relate to them.

Email marketing versus social media

Social media and content creation dramatically changed the world and how people get their news and information. This possibly meant that email marketing could take a major hit. But time has shown that the two can coexist as people use emails and social media side by side.

Social media is more geared towards the informal and casual communication whereas emails are mostly between B2B clients. In most cases email outperforms social media by huge margins and the return on investments are 30% more. The numbers suggest that 90% of adults in the US use emails, compared to only 74% of teenagers.

Final word

Email marketing is not yet out of the picture, not even close. As technology become more affordable for the masses, it is likely to increase the usage of sending and receiving emails. This is good news for email marketers to reach out to their consumers. The key is to appeal to the younger generation that has become smarter and more task centric than ever. Here is an interesting statistic – 81% of millennials and 73% of younger teens use filters to determine which emails to open and which to discard.